In most warehousing, manufacturing, and/or shipping environments, paperwork, such as invoices, packing slips, manuals, and other printed material, typically need to be packed within a box, carton, or other container along with the box's contents. Packing printed material within boxes can be a laborious and tedious process that is fraught with mistakes. Automated systems have been developed for packing the printed material, but these automated systems, as a practical matter, have several significant drawbacks. For example, traditional automated systems for placing printed material into boxes, such as in-line print feeder machines, require a series of belts that accumulate and queue the printed material. Typically, such machines have long queue times that require 15 seconds for the printed material to accumulate before being placed in the box. With these prior systems, the belts also create significant maintenance issues and usually have an uptime of no more than about 70%. Any time there is a failure, the long line of accumulated boxes have to be cleared before the machine, which in turn detrimentally impacts throughput and quality.
Thus, there is a need for improvement in this field.